The New York State Education Department just released High School Graduation and College Readiness Rates for the 2012-2013 school year. We’re still looking over the data to see what we can find (we think we’ll have quite a bit to write about!), but here is what’s jumping out at us so far.
- The graduation rate for Westchester decreased slightly from 85.9% in 2011 to 85.2% in 2013. This is contrary to the overall trend in New York State, which experienced a slight increase from 76.8% to 77.8% for the same time period.
- In 2013 less than half of Westchester students (47.6%) were ready for college, as was the case in 2012 (49.2%). We should note that we CANNOT draw any conclusions about the perceived decline in college readiness rates between these two years, as we cannot use the ELA/Math Aspirational Performance Measure (APM) to measure progress in college readiness across this time period. Changes in the Math Regents exams during the ’07-’08 to ’09-’10 school years make longitudinal comparisons a dodgy prospect, according to the folks at NYSED.
- There is quantitative evidence that disability status, race, the ability to speak English, and economic status can especially impact a student’s college/career readiness. They also, to a lesser extent, affect a student’s ability to graduate from high school in a timely manner.
- NYSED has released the data in a way that makes it impossible to look for “interactions” between race, gender, disability status, economic status and other factors listed in the data set. As a result, we can’t measure graduation/college readiness rates for certain subpopulations (Ex. African American males, White students who are economically disadvantaged). The ability to analyze subpopulations might shed additional light on why students fail to graduate high school and to be ready for college/career.
You can read NYSED’s press release here. In the coming weeks, we plan to share more analysis of the Westchester County school districts’ graduation and college readiness rates.
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